William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme

William Lever

William Hesketh Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme (born September 19, 1851 in Bolton , Lancashire , † May 7, 1925 in Hampstead (London) ) was a British chemical industrialist and politician.

biography

Lever was the son of a small retailer. He attended private schools and Bolton Church School before entering his father's shop as an apprentice. In 1885 William Lever founded the soap factory Lever Brothers with his younger brother James Darcy Lever (1854-1916) , from which Unilever emerged (1930 from the merger with the Dutch margarine company Margarine Unie). They had their first factory in Warrington . They made soap from glycerine and vegetable oils such as palm oil instead of from tallow , an invention of their partner, the chemist William Hough Watson . The brand name Sunlight for the soap was soon widely known. At the turn of the century, other brands such as Lifebuoy, Lux, Vim were added. The driving force behind the expansion at the end of the 19th century was William Hesketh Lever: in 1888 he was already selling 450 tons of soap a week. They soon had their own palm oil plantations in the Belgian Congo (today's Lusanga was formerly called Leverville) and on the Solomon Islands and expanded worldwide, including to Germany .

He was also known for caring for his employees and built a model housing estate for his workers ( Port Sunlight in the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral , Merseyside ) from 1888 to 1914 . He himself lived there in the country house Thornton Manor , which he bought in 1894. He had several other country estates and a house (The Hill) in Hampstead (London) over the years . He also bought the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides.

From 1906 to 1909 he was a member of the Liberal Party in the House of Commons for Wirral . On July 6, 1911 he was knighted as a Baronet , of Thornton Manor in the parish of Thornton Hough in the County of Chester . On 21 June 1917 he was a Baron Leverhulme , of Bolton-le-Moors in the County Palatine of Lancaster to peer collected and thus got a seat in the House of Lords . He was also High Sherriff of Lancashire in 1917 and Mayor of Bolton from 1918 to 1919. On November 27, 1922, he was also awarded the title Viscount Leverhulme , of The Western Isles in the Counties of Inverness and Ross and Cromarty .

In 1924 he received the Messel Medal from the Society of Chemical Industry .

From his marriage to Elizabeth Ellen Hulme on April 15, 1874, he had a son and heir, William Hulme Lever, 2nd Viscount Leverhulme , who succeeded him in the chemical company and his nobility.

Show houses in Port Sunlight

Personal life and memberships

Lord Leverhulme, 1918

• Lever was a congregationalist and religious. There were frequent family Bible readings, he was a teetotaler and a non-smoker. He also applied his principles to business life.

• William Lever had been an active member of the Freemasons Association since 1902 . In 1907 he was raised to the master's degree. He founded the Leverhulme Lodge, No. 4438 and held the office of Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Cheshire .

• He was also an art collector and bequeathed the Leverhulme Trust to promote science and education. The trust awards the two Leverhulme medals .

literature

• WP Jolly: Lord Leverhulme a Biography . Constable, London 1976.
• Brian Lewis: So clean. Lord Leverhulme, Soap and Civilization . UP, Manchester 2008.
• Jules Marchal : Lord Leverhulme's ghosts. Colonial exploitation in the Congo. Verso, London / New York 2008.

Web links

• William Hesketh Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme on thepeerage.com
• Mr William Lever at Hansard (English)
• Biography, from The Chemical Age 1919
• William Hesketh Lever , Sunlight. The "Helevtia soap factory" in Olten In: Oltner Neujahrsblätter , Vol. 7, 1949, pp. 52–66.
• Newspaper article about William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Biography at the Society of Industrial Chemistry
2. ↑ The London Gazette : No. 28566, p. 9826 , December 29, 1911.
3. ↑ The London Gazette : No. 30150, p. 6286 , June 26, 1917.
4. ↑ Lord Leverhulme (William Hesketh Lever). In: boltonsmayors.org.uk. Retrieved February 5, 2017 . 
5. ^ The London Gazette : No. 31271, p. 4414 , December 12, 1922.
6. ↑ How William Lever brought soap to the masses on the Freemasonry Today homepage. (Accessed June 11, 2018)

predecessor	Office	successor
New title created	Baronet, of Thornton Manor 1911-1925	William Lever
New title created	Baron Leverhulme 1917-1925	William Lever
New title created	Viscount Leverhulme 1922-1925	William Lever